The Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden seeks proposals for a multidisciplinary conference on Visions of Racial Justice and Childhood to be held in Camden, NJ, USA, on June 6 to June 8, 2024. This conference invites presentations that consider how different social actors and entities, including (but not limited to) governments, corporations, non- governmental organizations, and activist groups, have envisioned racial justice in relation to childhood and youth. What visions of racial justice are sustained, contested, and otherwise engaged across children’s literature, media, and popular culture? What roles have imagined and actual children played in constructing the politics of racial justice, and how have various inequalities, identities, and relationalities shaped this process across time and space? In what ways has the concept of “racial justice” been mobilized by various actors across the political spectrum? How are the notions of racial justice and childhood enacted in complementary and/or contradictory ways?

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Rethinking racialized inequalities through Abolitionist, decolonial and postcolonial epistemologies;
• Histories of racial capitalism and colonialism;
• Indigenous childhoods and racial difference;
• Multiple notions of race, including caste;
• Visual, textual and media representations of race and childhood;
• Racism, abelism and disability;
• Racial justice and environmental movements;
• Political violence and racial populism; 
• Structural racisim and children's rights discourses;
• Racial justice, childhoods, and time;
• Visions of childhood and race at varying scales.

We invite proposals for individual papers, pre-constituted panels, and pre- constituted roundtable discussions from graduate students and scholars in all areas of the humanities and humanistic social sciences. We also welcome proposals for presentations from youth organizers, artists, and adult community organizers.

This conference is funded by a grant on Rethinking Race and Justice Through Childhood Studies from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Department of Childhood  Studies at Rutgers University-Camden is the nation’s first doctoral degree-granting program in Childhood Studies. Its faculty members come from a wide  spectrum  of  scholarly disciplines. The Rutgers-Camden Campus is in Camden, NJ,   just across the Delaware River  from Philadelphia, PA,  and about two hours south of New York City.

Full call for papers and submission guidelines can be found here: https://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/racial-justice-childhood-conference...

The deadline for submissions is 11:59 pm (US Eastern Daylight Time) on October 15, 2023.

Please submit via this google form:https://forms.gle/GnMJjhB5GHVvWJ227

Successful applicants will be informed in early November.